De Duve, Christian René (1917-2013), an English-born Belgian biochemist, shared the 1974 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine with American biologists Albert Claude and George E. Palade. The three scientists were honored for their pioneer work in the structure and function of the cell.
After graduating in 1941 from the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, de Duve set himself the task of explaining the mechanism of the action of the hormone insulin, which regulates the body’s use of sugar and other food. In 1949, de Duve was investigating the action of insulin upon liver tissue, when he noticed by chance that the enzymes that break down cell material were behaving as if enclosed within a membrane. In 1955, he called the organelles (specialized parts of the cell) which contained these enzymes lysosomes. He later identified lysosomes with an electron microscope. Lysosomes, he discovered, are organelles containing destructive enzymes that serve a function akin to digestion. De Duve’s book A Guided Tour of the Living Cell was published in 1984.
Christian de Duve was born on Oct. 2, 1917, in Thames Ditton, near London. His parents were Belgian nationals who had taken refuge in the United Kingdom during World War I (1914-1918). De Duve and his family moved to Antwerp, Belgium, in 1920. He became a professor of medicine at the University of Louvain in 1951 and also at Rockefeller University in New York beginning in 1962. In 1974, he founded the International Institute of Cellular and Molecular Pathology (ICP) in Brussels, Belgium. The institute was founded to conduct basic research in molecular biology. By 1991, de Duve had retired from his official university and institute positions. However, he continued research activities and writing about biology, particularly on the origins of life on Earth. He died on May 4, 2013.
